A Concrete Example

Before the poem: garden words. A hedge is a wall of bushes; a fence is made of wood. Also: wheelbarrow, sapling (a young tree), flower bed, pebbles, garden hose, vines, and a rockery (a part of a garden made of rocks with small plants between them).

The word 'concrete'. It has two meanings:

• the hard grey building material (the road is made of concrete);
• clear, definite, real (she gave concrete proof).

Hold on to both; the title needs them.

Stanza 1. 'My next-door neighbour, Mrs. Jones, has got a garden full of stones.' Not flowers: stones.

Her garden has:

• a crazy path (a path of uneven, irregular stones, which is a little joke too);
• a lily pond;
• a rockery;
• and just beyond, a sundial (a device that tells the time from the sun's shadow) with a strange device, which Mrs. Jones thinks rather nice.

Stanza 2. Between the stones she puts little plants. The speaker is not impressed: 'They are so delicate and small, they don't mean anything at all. I can't think how she gets them in, unless she plants them with a pin.'

That last line is a funny exaggeration. Nobody plants with a pin! But it shows how tiny the plants are.

Notice that the word stones comes back in every stanza. The speaker keeps stressing it, to show Mrs Jones's obsession with her stony garden.

Stanza 3. Mrs. Jones invites the speaker round 'to see her stones' (to him, the garden is only stones). They stand talking about a flower for 'quite a quarter of an hour' (about 15 minutes).

'Where is this lovely thing?' the speaker cries. Mrs. Jones replies: 'You're standing on it.' The poem ends there. It needs nothing more.

Tone and form. The tone is humorous and light-hearted, not mocking and not sad. The speaker is the poet himself. The rhyme scheme is AABBCC: every two lines rhyme, which gives the poem a quick, chatty, funny feel.